(73rd in a series of posts on 2 W. Market St.)
Final observations on 2 W. Market – Part 2: The motion to table (71)
Gadfly obtained from the City a copy of the property info the City sent to CW Van Wirt and received by her and others on Council the morning of the December 18 meeting.
The cover memo: City memo 12-17-18
A color-coded map: City map 12-17-18
A spreadsheet (just one page here, total of 427 entries):
Gadfly thinks followers will agree that the info is not self-explanatory. In fact, generating even some provisional tentative useful conclusion from the data required further steps. CW Van Wirt needed a link to yet another map that she could blow up in order to count color-coded lots, and there were still uncertainties because of lack of clarity in the text amendment and inability to tell if all the color-coded lots were eligible.
Motion to table for further study in order?
Especially since no city official attended the meeting to answer questions and to help clarify.
Gadfly thinks so.
Easy call.
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And here’s the text of the resident email that CW Van Wirt read during her December 18 statement leading up to the motion to table:
“One analogy that keeps coming back to me (as I think about this zoning case and the historic preservation case for the 3rd & New building) is the city’s haphazardly allowing a few people to run red lights. Not in a systematic way (fire trucks with sirens get to run red lights) but just a few random unmarked cars. It doesn’t seem like a big deal; statistically, few people are likely to interact with those few cars at intersections. But this means that everyone becomes less confident in green lights. As another driver, I’m now always going to check to see if some of those lucky few are about to blow a red light at any intersection I’m at — the whole set of rules (go at green, stop at red) suffers. While zoning isn’t life-or-death, most of the people investing in housing or neighborhoods like some reassurance that what they invest in is likely to stay the same or at least change in a way that they can foresee. (That’s one of the big points of zoning.) Where there’s not that level of predictability, people become less likely to invest.”